Aquarium Drunkard heard the sonic threads of Julee Cruise, Roxy Music and Arthur Russell woven into the tapestry of Jackie West’s 2024 debut, Close to the Mystery. I am not well-versed on the album, but my occasional listens these past few weeks brought to mind a different set of name-checks, including (but not limited to) Hannah Cohen, whose Earthstar Mountain from last year is a future Delayed Play, Skeeter Davis, Cassandra Jenkins and Liz Phair. The same’s true for this, West’s sophomore set—but, really, at a certain point such references are meaningless. Every artist is somebody’s miracle; we hear what we hear, intuiting connections based on our distinct musical fascinations. That said, whether direct or indirect, I hear an ‘80s-era Lou Reed vibe running throughout Silent Century, most notably on the closing “Offer,” a sonic soliloquy that dissolves from spoken-word to sung lyrics; the only things missing are Robert Quine, Fernando Saunders and Fred Maher listed in the credits.
In lieu of Reed’s sidemen, however, West—who handles guitar—is accompanied by Dan Knishkowy (guitar, organ), Nico Osborne (bass, synths), Sean Mullins (drums, percussion, synths), Katie Von Schleicher (synths) and Nate Mendelsohn (sax). West co-produced with Knishkowy, while Von Schleicher and Mendelsohn engineered and mixed. The 11 songs were laid down in a week, with most recorded live.
The poppy title track, released as a single earlier this year, explores silence. Some folks, of course, forever seek to displace quiet with noise, but in so doing miss life’s magic and majesty. As West explains in the press release, ”Some experiences—especially intimate or spiritual—communicate without language, moving through us like traditions or instincts that endure quietly for generations. ‘Silent Century’ draws on the Taoist idea that silence is a medium of understanding—the flower doesn’t explain itself, and water doesn’t lecture the stone; yet both express and reshape the world over vast spans of time.”
“Thunder Ideal” ups the guitar quotient while delving into the link between emotions and nature. The press release quotes her as explaining, “Crying is like inner dusting—all emotional accumulations clear up, letting light through. NYC’s early spring atmosphere has a lot of that— heavy hot atmosphere, building, inevitability bursting into cool rain. ‘Thunder Ideal’ is simply the expression of emotional release and how we can remember we are also nature.”
The songs deal with an array of issues and concerns, both personal and universal, with West sometimes stepping into others’ shoes for a line or two before kicking them off and trying out a different perspective. “Course of Action,” for instance, finds her sharing elements from her own life (“I wake up slow/I wake up on my own time”) before channeling the realities others face (“people as bombs fly/people dead inside”). At near six minutes, it sounds both half as short and twice as long, its gentle groove gradually rippling into strong waves that splash to shore and leave you drenched.
Listening to Silent Century again this morning, I couldn’t help but to think of Denise Levertov, who has long been one of my favorite poets. I flipped through my anthology of her works, as I often do, reading poems I know by heart and others I don’t; her uncluttered verbiage shares indelible insights about life, love, faith, and more. The opening stanza of “Age of Terror,” written in 1981 (or thereabouts) about how the constant fear of nuclear annihilation has changed the human psyche somehow seems applicable here:
Between the fear
of the horror of Afterwards
and the despair
in the thought of no Afterwards,
we move abraded,
each gesture scraping us
on the millstones.
Add some gritty guitars, inject musings about quantum theory, Socrates, and $7 coffee, and you have the underpinnings of Silent Century. We live in a fear-driven time, after all, with that fear informing everything we do. West explores life as it is, not life as she wishes it to be. Hers is a stellar dispatch well worth experiencing.
The Old Grey Cat 